Single-pass satellite sensors that acquire panchromatic and multispectral images have many applications. Image acquisition and numerical analysis techniques can provide the ability for remote global monitoring of objects, such as cars, boats, airplanes, and their behavior, such as location, speed and trajectory, as well as their physical properties such as their shape, size and colour that can be used for identification, without a need of hardware solution. The information about objects acquired from single-pass satellite imagery provides geographic coverage in the spatial domain at an instant in time and can be acquired at sub-daily frequency from current single-pass satellite sensor as part of a constellation of sensors. The present invention allows the use of commercially available single-pass satellite imagery for global access for tracking, uniquely identifying and mapping objects from new image acquisition to historical archive data.
Single pass satellite imagery has been used for transportation planning, urban mapping, and maritime surveillance to name a few. Object motion mapping has been applied for vehicle extraction to provide traffic pattern information along transportation corridors and the development of spatial traffic congestion index accounting for vehicle motion, type, density, count and proximity for smart city applications. Other applications of Object Motion Mapping include Maritime Domain Awareness providing vessel tracking and identification of “Dark Targets”, Automated Information System (AIS) verification on vessels and coastal surveillance.
The prior art systems to determine movements of objects such as vehicles from optical images require two images separated by a short time interval, otherwise it is not possible to recognize the object displacement. The challenge with extracting the motion of an object and the attributes of the object is the ability to accurately delineate the object and to automate the process to suppress background noise, such as shadow or boat wash and accurately extract information.
If a method can be developed to extract motion information from currently available single-pass satellite imagery, new data can be extracted from the images. There is a wealth of satellite images, which have both historical values and also can be used to develop data base for future transportation planning, national security interest, economic assessment and other application.